Why Standing Rock is test for Obama

SUBHEAD: Climate math shows we need a managed decline of fossil fuels in the U.S. That means no DAPL.

By mark Trahant on 6 October 2016 for Yes Magazine -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/why-standing-rock-is-a-test-for-obama-and-all-climate-choices-ahead-20161006)


Image above: Energy policy adviser Brian Deese, who helped broker the Paris agreement, is congratulated by President Obama 10/5/16. White House photo by Pete Souza. From original article.

With the Paris Agreements taking effect in less than a month, climate math shows we need a managed decline of fossil fuels in the U.S. And that makes Standing Rock a test for Obama and all climate choices in the future.

Ten months ago, the United States told the world it was ready to do something about climate change. Enough talk. Time to act. And because of the nature of the crisis, the world’s governments are moving quickly (well, at least as measured by governments).

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama announced the global agreement from the Paris talks will begin implementation on November 4 after being ratified by European nations.

“Today, the world meets the moment. And if we follow through on the commitments that this agreement embodies, history may well judge it as a turning point for our planet,” the president said.

The Paris agreement formally begins four days before the U.S. presidential election, in which Republican Donald Trump opposes that agreement as well as its science while Democrat Hillary Clinton strongly supports it.

“Now, the Paris Agreement alone will not solve the climate crisis. Even if we meet every target embodied in the agreement, we’ll only get to part of where we need to go,” the President said. But make no mistake, this agreement will help delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change.

It will help other nations ratchet down their dangerous carbon emissions over time and set bolder targets as technology advances, all under a strong system of transparency that allows each nation to evaluate the progress of all other nations.

And by sending a signal that this is going to be our future—a clean energy future—it opens up the floodgates for businesses and scientists and engineers to unleash high-tech, low-carbon investment and innovation at a scale that we’ve never seen before. So this gives us the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got.”

The test of those words is found at Standing Rock.

If the president, the government, the world really believe that the agreement will only get us part of where we need to go to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, then stopping the Dakota Access pipeline is essential.

A recent report by Oil Change International and a consortium of environmental organizations calls for a “managed decline of fossil fuel production.” The logic is simple math. The study measures potential carbon emissions from “where the wells are already drilled, the pits dug, and the pipelines, processing facilities, railways, and export terminals constructed.”

Add those numbers up, and “the potential carbon emissions from the oil, gas, and coal in the world’s currently operating fields and mines would take us beyond 2 degrees Celsius of warming.”

In other words: “Keep It in the Ground” is not just a slogan but the answer to the math question, “How does the world meet its target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees?” Remember— and this is important—2 degrees Celsius is supposed to be the upper limit. The Paris agreement calls for nations to work toward a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, a much more difficult goal.

“Scientists say that to have even a two-thirds chance of staying below a global increase of 2 degrees Celsius, we can release 800 gigatons more CO2 into the atmosphere,” writes Bill McKibben in The New Republic.

“But the Rystad data shows coal mines and oil and gas wells currently in operation worldwide contain 942 gigatons worth of CO2. So the math problem is simple, and it goes like this: 942 > 800.” That’s just to hit the 2 degree target. To reach the more difficult stretch goal?

McKibben says, “To have even a 50–50 chance of meeting that goal, we can only release about 353 gigatons more CO2. So let’s do the math again: 942 > 353.”

As challenging as that number is, it does not mean giving up fossil fuels immediately. (One of the first dismissals of what was occurring at Standing Rock was by industry supporters who said, “Oh, but they drive cars and trucks there …”)

The Oil Change International report states: “This does not mean stopping using all fossil fuels overnight. Governments and companies should conduct a managed decline of the fossil fuel industry and ensure a just transition for the workers and communities that depend on it.”

That’s really the key in North Dakota—and beyond. The transition begins by saying that Dakota Access pipeline represents our past and a mistake. And as part of a managed decline, major fossil fuel infrastructure projects like this pipeline—are no more.

But what about the jobs the pipeline construction would bring? What will this do to North Dakota? Actually, it could be a great thing.

Data from Stanford researchers shows that the transition to clean energy could happen faster than projected—and benefit any state almost immediately. The Solutions Project says that, in North Dakota, a transformation toward clean energy “pays for itself in as little as two years from air pollution and climate cost savings alone.”

Two years? Imagine all the intellectual activity, the construction, the jobs, the fresh investment that would come together to make that so. It would be mind-blowing. The Stanford data says such a transition would create 8,574 permanent operations jobs and 21,744 construction jobs.


On Wednesday, the White House listed out its accomplishments on climate change, a couple of pages: investments in clean energy, new pollution rules, car standards, and generally creative thinking. But there was no plan for a managed decline. There was no math behind the numbers.

This global challenge, the data of climate change, adds up to one thing: Standing Rock is a test.
The United States cannot meet its obligations to the world if it continues business as usual. It’s just not possible; the math of carbon emissions cannot be wished away.

The people who are camped at Standing Rock are giving President Obama the opportunity to show how a managed decline is possible. And, if done right, inspiring. As the president said, “This gives us the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got.”

• Mark Trahant originally wrote this article for Trahant Reports. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.
 
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Why we are Singing for Water 10/8/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Labor's Dakota Access Pipeline Crisis 10/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Standing Firm for Standing Rock 10/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Contact bankers behind DAPL 9/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: NoDAPL demo at Enbridge Inc 9/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Militarized Police raid NoDAPL 9/28/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Stop funding of Dakota Access Pipeline 9/27/16
Ea O Ka Aina: UN experts to US, "Stop DAPL Now!" 9/27/16
Ea O Ka Aina: No DAPL solidarity grows 9/21/16
Ea O Ka Aina: This is how we should be living 9/16/16
Ea O Ka Aina: 'Natural Capital' replacing 'Nature' 9/14/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Big Difference at Standing Rock 9/13/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Jill Stein joins Standing Rock Sioux 9/10/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Pipeline temporarily halted 9/6/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Native Americans attacked with dogs 9/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Mni Wiconi! Water is Life! 9/3/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Sioux can stop the Pipeline 8/28/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Officials cut water to Sioux 8/23/16   


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The Right and Climate Catastrophe

SUBHEAD: At this point, electing Green-minded leaders is the only realistic path to a habitable planet.

By Michael T. Klare on 15 September 2016 for Tom Dispatch -
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176186/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_the_rise_of_the_right_and_climate_catastrophe/)


Image above: US Presidential candidate Donald Trump "I'm not a big believer in Global Warming". From (http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-nye-great-response-donald-trump-statements-climate-change-2016-1).

In a year of record-setting heat on a blistered globe, with fast-warming oceans, fast-melting ice caps, and fast-rising sea levels, ratification of the December 2015 Paris climate summit agreement -- already endorsed by most nations -- should be a complete no-brainer.  That it isn't tells you a great deal about our world.

Global geopolitics and the possible rightward lurch of many countries (including a potential deal-breaking election in the United States that could put a climate denier in the White House) spell bad news for the fate of the Earth. It’s worth exploring how this might come to be.

The delegates to that 2015 climate summit were in general accord about the science of climate change and the need to cap global warming at 1.5 to 2.0 degrees Celsius (or 2.6 to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit) before a planetary catastrophe ensues.  They disagreed, however, about much else.

Some key countries were in outright conflict with other states (Russia with Ukraine, for example) or deeply hostile to each other (as with India and Pakistan or the U.S. and Iran). In recognition of such tensions and schisms, the assembled countries crafted a final document that replaced legally binding commitments with the obligation of each signatory state to adopt its own unique plan, or “nationally determined contribution” (NDC), for curbing climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions.

As a result, the fate of the planet rests on the questionable willingness of each of those countries to abide by that obligation, however sour or bellicose its relations with other signatories may be.  As it happens, that part of the agreement has already been buffeted by geopolitical headwinds and is likely to face increasing turbulence in the years to come.

That geopolitics will play a decisive role in determining the success or failure of the Paris Agreement has become self-evident in the short time since its promulgation.

While some progress has been made toward its formal adoption -- the agreement will enter into force only after no fewer than 55 countries, accounting for at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions, have ratified it -- it has also encountered unexpected political hurdles, signaling trouble to come.

On the bright side, in a stunning diplomatic coup, President Obama persuaded Chinese President Xi Jinping to sign the accord with him during a recent meeting of the G-20 group of leading economies in Hangzhou.

Together, the two countries are responsible for a striking 40% of global emissions.  “Despite our differences on other issues,” Obama noted during the signing ceremony, “we hope our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire further ambition and further action around the world.”

Brazil, the planet's seventh largest emitter, just signed on as well, and a number of states, including Japan and New Zealand, have announced their intention to ratify the agreement soon.

Many others are expected to do so before the next major U.N. climate summit in Marrakesh, Morocco, this November.

On the dark side, however, Great Britain’s astonishing Brexit vote has complicated the task of ensuring the European Union’s approval of the agreement, as European solidarity on the climate issue -- a major factor in the success of the Paris negotiations -- can no longer be assured. “There is a risk that this could kick EU ratification of the Paris Agreement into the long grass,” suggests Jonathan Grant, director of sustainability at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The Brexit campaign itself was spearheaded by politicians who were also major critics of climate science and strong opponents of efforts to promote a transition from carbon-based fuels to green sources of energy.

For example, the chair of the Vote Leave campaign, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, is also chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think-tank devoted to sabotaging government efforts to speed the transition to green energy.

Many other top Leave campaigners, including former Conservative ministers John Redwood and Owen Paterson, were also vigorous climate deniers.

In explaining the strong link between these two camps, analysts at the Economist noted that both oppose British submission to international laws and norms: “Brexiteers dislike EU regulations and know that any effective action to tackle climate change will require some kind of global cooperation: carbon taxes or binding targets on emissions.

The latter would be the EU writ large and Britain would have even less say in any global agreement, involving some 200 nations, than in an EU regime involving 28.”

Keep in mind as well that Angela Merkel and François Hollande, the leaders of the other two anchors of the European Union, Germany and France, are both embattled by right-wing anti-immigrant parties likely to be similarly unfriendly to such an agreement.  And in what could be the deal-breaker of history, this same strain of thought, combining unbridled nationalism, climate denialism, fierce hostility to immigration, and unwavering support for domestic fossil fuel production, also animates Donald Trump’s campaign for the American presidency.

In his first major speech on energy, delivered in May, Trump -- who has called global warming a Chinese hoax -- pledged to “cancel the Paris climate agreement” and scrap the various measures announced by President Obama to ensure U.S. compliance with its provisions.

Echoing the views of his Brexit counterparts, he complained that “this agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use on our land, in our country. No way.”

He also vowed to revive construction of the Keystone XL pipeline (which would bring carbon-heavy Canadian tar sands oil to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast), to reverse any climate-friendly Obama administration acts, and to promote the coal industry.  “Regulations that shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants and block the construction of new ones -- how stupid is that?” he said, mockingly.

In Europe, ultra-nationalist parties on the right are riding a wave of Islamaphobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and disgust with the European Union.

In France, for instance, former president Nicolas Sarkozy announced his intention to run for that post again, promising even more stringent controls on migrants and Muslims and a greater focus on French “identity.” Even further to the right, the rabidly anti-Muslim Marine Le Pen is also in the race at the head of her National Front Party.

Like-minded candidates have already made gains in national elections in Austria and most recently in a state election in Germany that stunned Merkel’s ruling party.

In each case, they surged by disavowing relatively timid efforts by the European Union to resettle refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries.

Although climate change is not a defining issue in these contests as it is in the U.S. and Britain, the growing opposition to anything associated with the EU and its regulatory system poses an obvious threat to future continent-wide efforts to cap greenhouse gas emissions.

Elsewhere in the world, similar strands of thinking are spreading, raising serious questions about the ability of governments to ratify the Paris Agreement or, more importantly, to implement its provisions.  Take India, for example.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has indeed voiced support for the Paris accord and promised a vast expansion of solar power.  He has also made no secret of his determination to promote economic growth at any cost, including greatly increased reliance on coal-powered electricity. That spells trouble.

According to the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy, India is likely to double its coal consumption over the next 25 years, making it the world’s second largest coal consumer after China.

Combined with an increase in oil and natural gas consumption, such a surge in coal use could result in a tripling of India’s carbon dioxide emissions at a time when most countries (including the U.S. and China) are expected to experience a peak or decline in theirs.

Prime Minister Modi is well aware that his devotion to coal has generated resentment among environmentalists in India and elsewhere who seek to slow the growth of carbon emissions. He nonetheless insists that, as a major developing nation, India should enjoy a special right to achieve economic growth in any way it can, even if this means endangering the environment.

“The desire to improve one's lot has been the primary driving force behind human progress,” his government affirmed in its emissions-reduction pledge to the Paris climate summit. “Nations that are now striving to fulfill this ‘right to grow’ of their teeming millions cannot be made to feel guilty [about] their development agenda as they attempt to fulfill this legitimate aspiration.”

Russia is similarly likely to put domestic economic needs (and the desire to remain a great power, militarily and otherwise) ahead of its global climate obligations.

Although President Vladimir Putin attended the Paris summit and assured the gathered nations of Russian compliance with its outcome, he has also made it crystal clear that his country has no intention of giving up its reliance on oil and natural gas exports for a large share of its national income.

According to the Energy Information Administration, Russia’s government relies on such exports for a staggering 50% of its operating revenue, a share it dare not jeopardize at a time when its economy -- already buffeted by European Union and U.S. sanctions -- is in deep recession.

To ensure the continued flow of hydrocarbon income, in fact, Moscow has announced multibillion dollar plans to develop new oil and gas fields in Siberia and the Arctic, even if such efforts fly in the face of commitments to reduce future carbon emissions.

From Reform and Renewal to Rivalry
Such nationalistic exceptionalism could become something of the norm if Donald Trump wins in November, or other nations join those already eager to put the needs of a fossil fuel-based domestic growth agenda ahead of global climate commitments.

With that in mind, consider the assessment of future energy trends that the Norwegian energy giant Statoil recently produced.  In it is a chilling scenario focused on just this sort of dystopian future.

The second-biggest producer of natural gas in Europe after Russia’s Gazprom, Statoil annually issues Energy Perspectives, a report that explores possible future energy trends.

Previous editions included scenarios labeled “reform” (predicated on coordinated but gradual international efforts to shift from carbon fuels to green energy technology) and “renewal” (positing a more rapid transition).

The 2016 edition, however, added a grim new twist: “rivalry.” It depicts a realistically downbeat future in which international strife and geopolitical competition discourage significant cooperation in the climate field.

According to the document, the new section is “driven” by real-world developments -- by, that is, “a series of political crises, growing protectionism, and a general fragmentation of the state system, resulting in a multipolar world developing in different directions.  In this scenario, there is growing disagreement about the rules of the game and a decreasing ability to manage crises in the political, economic, and environmental arenas.”

In such a future, Statoil suggests, the major powers would prove to be far more concerned with satisfying their own economic and energy requirements than pursuing collaborative efforts aimed at slowing the pace of climate change.

For many of them, this would mean maximizing the cheapest and most accessible fuel options available -- often domestic supplies of fossil fuels.

Under such circumstances, the report suggests, the use of coal would rise, not fall, and its share of global energy consumption would actually increase from 29% to 32%.

In such a world, forget about those “nationally determined contributions” agreed to in Paris and think instead about a planet whose environment will grow ever less friendly to life as we know it.  In its rivalry scenario, writes Statoil, “the climate issue has low priority on the regulatory agenda.

While local pollution issues are attended to, large-scale international climate agreements are not the chosen way forward.

As a consequence, the current NDCs are only partly implemented. Climate finance ambitions are not met, and carbon pricing to stimulate cost-efficient reductions in countries and across national borders are limited.”

Coming from a major fossil fuel company, this vision of how events might play out on an increasingly tumultuous planet makes for peculiar reading: more akin to Eaarth -- Bill McKibben’s dystopian portrait of a climate-ravaged world -- than the usual industry-generated visions of future world health and prosperity.

And while “rivalry” is only one of several scenarios Statoil’s authors considered, they clearly found it unnervingly convincing.

Hence, in a briefing on the report, the company’s chief economist Eirik Wærness indicated that Great Britain’s looming exit from the EU was exactly the sort of event that would fit the proposed model and might multiply in the future.

Climate Change in a World of Geopolitical Exceptionalism
Indeed, the future pace of climate change will be determined as much by geopolitical factors as by technological developments in the energy sector.

While it is evident that immense progress is being made in bringing down the price of wind and solar power in particular -- far more so than all but a few analysts anticipated until recently -- the political will to turn such developments into meaningful global change and so bring carbon emissions to heel before the planet is unalterably transformed may, as the Statoil authors suggest, be dematerializing before our eyes.

If so, make no mistake about it: we will be condemning Earth’s future inhabitants, our own children and grandchildren, to unmitigated disaster.

As President Obama’s largely unheralded success in Hangzhou indicates, such a fate is not etched in stone. If he could persuade the fiercely nationalistic leader of a country worried about its economic future to join him in signing the climate agreement, more such successes are possible. His ability to achieve such outcomes is, however, diminishing by the week, and few other leaders of his stature and determination appear to be waiting in the wings.

To avoid an Eaarth (as both Bill McKibben and the Statoil authors imagine it) and preserve the welcoming planet in which humanity grew and thrived, climate activists will have to devote at least as much of their energy and attention to the international political arena as to the technology sector.

At this point, electing green-minded leaders, stopping climate deniers (or ignorers) from capturing high office, and opposing fossil-fueled ultra-nationalism is the only realistic path to a habitable planet.

• Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @mklare1.

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Legislation against Ecocide

SUBHEAD: Ecocide law challenges the view of nature as a lifeless “object” for human use.

By Femke Wijdekop on 15 August 2016 for -
(http://greattransition.org/publication/against-ecocide)


Image above: Illustration of Gaia. From (https://plus.google.com/photos/114619857924598835322/albums/5921667805572944945).

The current legal regime allows states and corporations to despoil the environment with impunity. This injustice has inspired a new movement of legal experts and citizens calling for the codification of ecocide as a fifth crime against peace, joining genocide, crimes of aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Their work aims to transform our understanding of nature from property to an equal partner with humans in building sustainable societies.

The political and enforcement hurdles are formidable, but an awakened and engaged citizenry, strengthened by the Paris climate agreement, may prove powerful enough to elevate the prevention of crimes against nature to an internationally recognized norm.

The Rights of Nature

Last summer, I sat in a Dutch courtroom and listened to a verdict that would make headlines around the world. The judges of The Hague District Court ruled that the government of the Netherlands had a legal obligation to act in the best interests of current and future generations by lowering its CO2 emissions. For the first time, a court had established a “duty of care” towards future citizens in matters of climate policy.

This landmark verdict encouraged non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Belgium, France, the Philippines, and other countries to seek climate justice through legal and human rights frameworks.¹

For example, a groundbreaking judgment in Seattle last fall ruled that the State of Washington had a constitutional obligation and public trust duty to preserve, protect, and enhance air quality for current and future generations.²

The rise—and success—of climate litigation has been an exciting development in the legal landscape. Such litigation challenges short-term political thinking with legal action that focuses on the long-term consequences of today’s decisions.

An even bigger breakthrough might be on the horizon, as lawyers around the world are advocating for the introduction of a legal duty of care towards the natural world.

This effort aims to make ecocide—the massive damage and destruction of ecosystems, such as the deforestation of the Amazon, the Deep Horizon oil spill, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and Athabasca tar sands extraction—an international crime.

 Their strategy is to add ecocide to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the fifth crime against peace (along with genocide, crimes of aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes), and to have ecocide law introduced in the national jurisdictions of the member states of the ICC.³

Initiatives to criminalize ecocide express an emerging ecocentric worldview in law that affords intrinsic value and rights to nature.⁴

This duty of care toward nature demands that human laws be harmonized with nature’s laws. To achieve this, we must act as “Earth guardians,” giving voice and legal standing to nature’s rights and interests when crafting legislation and public policy.

In an ecocentric framework, it is not enough to integrate the interests of future generations in lawmaking; the interests of nature must also be integrated to do justice to our interconnection with and dependence on the natural world.

This ecocentric worldview challenges the dominant legal paradigm in which nature is seen as “property,” and humans its owners. In prevailing legal and economic systems, the human relationship with the natural world has been one of exploitation and domination, and environmental destruction has been accepted as collateral damage in the pursuit of profit.

Ecocide law challenges the view of nature as a lifeless “object” for human use, drawing a clear line beyond which massive anthropogenic damage to ecosystems is a crime.

A Short History of Ecocide

Though the concept of ecocide may seem novel to some, it has been a part of environmental discourse for over four decades. The term was coined in 1970 by the American biologist Arthur Galston at the Conference on War and National Responsibility. In the 1950s, he had worked in a laboratory helping to develop a chemical component of the defoliant Agent Orange, infamously used in the Vietnam War to destroy vegetation and poison communities on a massive scale.

Appalled by the use of his creation, Galston became an antiwar activist and the first person to label the massive damage and destruction of ecosystems as ecocide. The word derives from the Greek oikos, meaning “house or home,” and the Latin caedere, meaning “to demolish or kill.” Ecocide thus literally translates to “killing our home.”

In 1972, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme explicitly referred to the Vietnam War as ecocide in his opening speech for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment.

“The immense destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing, by large scale use of bulldozers and herbicides is an outrage sometimes described as ecocide, which requires urgent international attention,” he expounded. The conference adopted the Stockholm Declaration, the first international legal document to explicitly recognize the right to a healthy environment.

At the People’s Forum, an unofficial event running parallel to the UN Conference, thousands of people took to the streets, demanding that ecocide be declared a crime.

The 1970s and 1980s saw extensive study and debate within the UN about expanding the 1948 Genocide Convention, with several countries advocating the inclusion of ecocide. In 1985, the official Whitaker Report recommended the inclusion of ecocide in the draft Code of Offences Against the Peace and Security of Mankind, the precursor to the 1998 Rome Statute.

The following year, ecocide was defined in the draft Code as “a serious breach of an international obligation of essential importance for the safeguarding and preservation of the human environment,” language that was broadly supported by most members of the UN’s International Law Commission.

The 1991 version of the Code included draft Article 26: “An individual who willfully causes or orders the causing of widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment shall, on conviction thereof, be sentenced.”

In 1995, however, such language was withdrawn from the draft code through a unilateral decision by the commission chairman, likely under pressure from a few states and the nuclear lobby.⁵ Whatever the reason, ecocide was never included in the Rome Statute of the ICC.

Conceptual Comeback

The idea of codifying ecocide as an international crime has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. In 2010, Scottish lawyer Polly Higgins proposed to the International Law Commission that the Rome Statute be amended to include ecocide, defining it as “the extensive damage to, destruction of, or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished.”

Notably, she speaks of the “inhabitants” of a territory instead of its “human population,” aiming to protect not only humans, but also all other members of the animal kingdom.

Since 2010, Higgins has been seeking support for her ecocide amendment from heads of state, lawyers, business leaders, civil society, and the international community.⁶

This year, she has focused in particular on the officials of Small Island Developing States, whose countries are under severe threat from intensifying storm activity and rising sea levels induced by climate change. Higgins’s goal is to create a legal duty of care compelling the international community to provide assistance to these and other territories that suffer from such human-induced ecocide.

An emerging social movement, notably End Ecocide on Earth, has complemented this work. An international team of lawyers (French, American, and Togan) have drafted End Ecocide on Earth’s own ecocide amendment to the Rome Statute, which focuses on protecting ecosystem services and the global commons (including the atmosphere, the oceans and seas beyond territorial waters, the Arctic, Antarctic, and migratory species).

The team defines ecocide as “an extensive damage or destruction which would have for consequence a significant and durable alteration of the global commons or ecosystem services upon which rely a group or subgroup of a human population” within the framework of known planetary boundaries.⁷

The protective space for the global commons and ecosystem services they propose aims to stop the exploitation of these resources resulting from national sovereignty and unbridled capitalism.

The movement has been gaining momentum in political, academic, and legal circles. At the climate conference in Paris this past December, the Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, with the support of Bolivia and Venezuela, called for the creation of an international court of environmental justice to punish crimes against nature and for the adoption of an international declaration of nature’s rights.

Argentinian Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist Adolfo Pérez Esquivel has been advocating since 2009 on behalf of the International Academy of Environmental Sciences for the establishment of an international tribunal for crimes against the environment. Various legal scholars have also put forth detailed blueprints for making environmental destruction a crime under international law.⁸

A Tool for Peace

This increasing support for the international prohibition of ecocide comes at a time of unprecedented ecological crisis. Severe environmental damage engenders a cycle of violence that abrogates the rights to life, health, and security of people living in the affected areas.

 Furthermore, such destruction and pollution can lead to food scarcity, forced displacement, and conflict between displaced peoples and the inhabitants of the territories to which they migrate. In this way, the ecological crisis is closely connected to the social and humanitarian crises of the early twenty-first century.

Designating ecocide an international crime against peace can catalyze a transition to a green economy and a more peaceful global civilization. It would alert corporations and states that there are legal consequences to serious damage and destruction of ecosystems, and establish a normative threshold which it is illegal to cross.⁹

Harmful extractive practices would thus become riskier for transnational corporations and their investors, stimulating greater investment in renewables and sustainable agriculture. Just as abolition in the nineteenth century radically changed people’s view of slavery in a short period of time, so, too, does an international prohibition of ecocide promise to realign prevailing value systems, placing the preservation of ecological integrity above the profit motive.

Political consensus and enforcement remain formidable but surmountable barriers. Amending the Rome Statute requires a two-thirds majority of signatories, i.e., the heads of state for eighty-two countries. Small Island Developing States and Andean countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador, with indigenous cultures supportive of legal protection for the Earth, might formally propose the ecocide amendment at the ICC this year.

If this proves successful, the next challenge would be to get Russia, India, China, and the United States on board. These major powers are not party to the ICC, complicating effective, long-term global enforcement of a prohibition of ecocide.

Enforcement of ecocide law under the Rome Statute would follow the “complementarity principle,” under which the ICC would only intervene when national judicial systems fail and a state party is either unwilling or unable to bring perpetrators of ecocide to justice.

Of course, this will likely prove challenging. The ICC, lacking a “global” police force or other enforcement arm, depends on the cooperation of the international community and its own standing as a reputable international institution. Yet while enforcement of the prohibition of genocide under the Rome Statute has been a thorny challenge, genocide is now the exception, rather than the norm. The same will likely happen with ecocide.

Adding ecocide to the Rome Statute as the fifth crime against peace will provide the legal tools for lawyers to act and speak on behalf of those harmed by massive environmental damage and destruction, making it increasingly unlikely that the international community will deem it acceptable for ecocide to occur.

Despite the immense challenges this movement faces, the December 2015 Paris climate agreement offers grounds for optimism. The move among investors from fossil fuels to renewables, the environmental advocacy of religious leaders such as Pope Francis, and the increasing pressure of climate litigation on policymakers suggest that a global ecological sensibility may be rising.

Anchoring this sensibility in laws that protect the intrinsic value of the natural world would be a significant step in the Great Transition to a sustainable world.

Endnotes

1. Megan Darby, “Around the World in 5 Climate Change Lawsuits,” Climate Home, September 7, 2015, http://www.climatechangenews.com/2015/07/08/around-the-world-in-5-climate-change-lawsuits/.

2. “BREAKING: Judge Protects Right to Stable Climate in Groundbreaking Decision in Washington Case!” press release, Our Children’s Trust, November 19, 2015, http://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/event/717/breaking-judge-protects-right-stable-climate-groundbreaking-decision-washington-case/.

3. UN General Assembly, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (last amended 2010), July 17, 1998.

4. See Pablo Solón’s insightful analysis in “Notes for the Debate: Rights of Mother Earth,” Systemic Alternatives, August 20, 2014, http://systemicalternatives.org/2014/08/20/notes-for-the-debate-the-rights-of-mother-earth/.

5. Anja Gauger, Mai Pouye Rabatel-Fernel, Louise Kulbicki, Damien Short, and Polly Higgins, Ecocide Is the Missing 5th Crime Against Peace (London: Human Rights Consortium, 2012), 10, 11, http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/4830/1/Ecocide_research_report_19_July_13.pdf.

6. For an introduction to Higgins’s work, see Polly Higgins, “Ecocide, the 5th Crime Against Peace” (lecture, TEDxExeter, Exeter, UK, May 1, 2012), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EuxYzQ65H4/.

7. For more information, see https://www.endecocide.org/ecocides/.

8. “Court of Environmental Justice Is at Breaking Point: Ecuadorian Minister of Environment,” Andes, November 30, 2015, http://www.andes.info.ec/en/news/court-environmental-justice-breaking-point-ecuadorian-minister-environment.html; Ciara Nugent, “Latin American Leaders Denounce Effects of Capitalism on Environment,” Argentina Independent, October 13, 2015, http://www.argentinaindependent.com/currentaffairs/newsfromlatinamerica/latin-american-leaders-denounce-effects-of-capitalism-on-environment/; Laura Gauchalla, “International Environmental Justice Court Needed, Summit Participants Say,” Reuters, April 23, 2010, http://news.trust.org//item/20100423103200-guad9/; Steven Freeland, Addressing the Intentional Destruction of the Environment during Warfare under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge, UK: Intersentia, 2015); Laura McNamara, “Ecocide: An Environmental Investigation with a Legal Twist,” Journalism Grants, interview with Gilles van Kote, July 7, 2015, http://journalismgrants.org/news/2015/ecocide-an-environmental-investigation-with-a-legal-twist.

9. Bronwyn Lay, Laurent Neyret, Damien Short, Michael Urs Baumgartner, and Anonio Oposa, Jr., “Timely and Necessary: Ecocide Law as Urgent and Emerging,” The Journal Jurisprudence 28 (December 2015): 451-452, http://www.jurisprudence.com.au/juris28/lay.pdf.


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Down the Ratholes of the Future

SUBHEAD: It’s easy to predict that the things that got worse in the past are likely to keep getting worse in the future.

By John Michael Greer on 6 January 2016 for the Archdruid Roport -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/01/down-ratholes-of-future.html)


Image above: Banned Indian coal mine (called a "Rat Hole" is dangerous to workers and damages the environment. From (http://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2014/11/unprecedented-coal-shutdown-tests-authority-indias-court/).

The new year now upon us has brought out the usual quota of predictions about what 2016 has in store, and I propose as usual to make my own contribution to that theme. I’ve noted more than once in the past that people who make predictions about the future really ought to glance back at those predictions from time to time and check how well they’re doing.

With that in mind, before we go on to 2016, I’d like to take a moment to look back over the predictions I made last year. My post on the subject covered a lot of territory in the course of offering those predictions, and I’ve trimmed down the discussion a bit here for the sake of readability; those who want to read the whole thing as originally published will find it here.

In summarized form, though, this is what I predicted:

“The first and most obvious [thing to expect] is the headlong collapse of the fracking bubble [...] Wall Street has been using the fracking industry in all the same ways it used the real estate industry in the runup to the 2008 crash, churning out what we still laughably call “securities” on the back of a rapidly inflating speculative bubble. As the slumping price of oil kicks the props out from under the fracking boom, the vast majority of that paper—the junk bonds issued by fracking-industry firms, the securitized loans those same firms used to make up for the fact that they lost money every single quarter, the chopped and packaged shale leases, the volumetric production agreements, and all the rest of it—will revert to its actual value, which in most cases approximates pretty closely to zero.

“Thus one of the entertainments 2015 has in store for us is a thumping economic crisis here in the US, and in every other country that depends on our economy for its bread and butter. The scale of the crash depends on how many people bet how much of their financial future on the fantasy of an endless frack-propelled boom, but my guess is it’ll be somewhere around the scale of the 2008 real estate bust.

“Something else that’s baked into the baby new year’s birthday cake at this point is a rising spiral of political unrest here in the United States. [...] Will an American insurgency funded by one or more hostile foreign powers get under way in 2015? I don’t think so, though I’m prepared to be wrong. More likely, I think, is another year of rising tensions, political gridlock, scattered gunfire, and rhetoric heated to the point of incandescence, while the various players in the game get into position for actual conflict: the sort of thing the United States last saw in the second half of the 1850s, as sectional tensions built toward the bloody opening rounds of the Civil War. [...]

“Meanwhile, back behind these foreground events, the broader trends this blog has been tracking since its outset are moving relentlessly on their own trajectories. 

The world’s finite supplies of petroleum, along with most other resources on which industrial civilization depends for survival, are depleting further with each day that passes; the ecological consequences of treating the atmosphere as an aerial sewer for the output of our tailpipes and smokestacks, along with all the other frankly brainless ways our civilization maltreats the biosphere that sustains us all, builds apace; caught between these two jaws of a tightening vise, industrial civilization has entered the rising spiral of crisis about which so many environmental scientists tried to warn the world back in the 1970s, and only a very small minority of people out on the fringes of our collective discourse has shown the least willingness to recognize the mess we’re in and start changing their own lives in response: the foundation, it bears repeating, of any constructive response to the crisis of our era.”

What I missed, and should have anticipated, is the extent to which the failure of the fracking fantasy has been hushed up by the mainstream US media.

I should have anticipated that, too, because the same thing happened with the last energy boom that was going to save us all, the corn ethanol bubble that inflated so dramatically a decade ago and crumpled not long thereafter.

Plenty of firms in the fracking industry have gone bankrupt, the junk bonds that propped up the industry are selling for pennies on the dollar to anyone willing to gamble on them, and all those grand claims that fracking was going to bring a new era of US energy independence have been quietly roundfiled next to the identical claims made for ethanol not that many years before; still, this hasn’t yielded the sudden shock I expected.

The ripple effect on the US economy has been slower than I anticipated, too. Thus, instead of the thumping economic crisis I predicted, we’ve seen a slow grinding contraction, papered over by the usual frantic maneuvers on the part of the Fed.

In effect, instead of popping, the fracking bubble sprang a slow leak, which has played out in a muffled drumbeat of worsening economic news rather than a sudden plunge. So I missed on that one. The rest of the year’s predictions? Once again, I called it.

Now of course, as my critics like to point out, it’s easy to look at everything that’s getting worse each year, and predict that all those things are just going to keep getting worse in the year to come.

What those same critics tend to forget is that this strategy may be easy but, unlike the alternatives, it works.

Every January, with a predictability that puts clockwork to shame, people trot out the same shopworn predictions of game-changing breakthroughs and game-over catastrophes.

One blogger announces that this will be the year that renewable energy reaches critical mass, while another insists with equal enthusiasm that this will be the year when the wheels come off the global economy once and for all.

Another year passes, the breakthroughs and the catastrophes pull a no-show yet again, and here we are, 365 days further down the long ragged trajectory that leads to the end of the industrial age.

Thus my core prediction for 2016 is that all the things that got worse in 2015 will keep on getting worse over the year to come.

The ongoing depletion of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources will keep squeezing the global economy, as the real (i.e., nonfinancial) costs of resource extraction eat up more and more of the world’s total economic output, and this will drive drastic swings in the price of energy and commodities—currently those are still headed down, but they’ll soar again in a few years as demand destruction completes its work.

The empty words in Paris a few weeks ago will do nothing to slow the rate at which greenhouse gases are dumped into the atmosphere, raising the economic and human cost of climate-related disasters above 2015’s ghastly totals—and once again, the hard fact that leaving carbon in the ground means giving up the lifestyles that depend on digging it up and burning it is not something that more than a few people will be willing to face.

Meanwhile, the US economy will continue to sputter and stumble as politicians and financiers try to make up for ongoing declines in real (i.e., nonfinancial) wealth by manufacturing paper wealth at an even more preposterous pace than before, and frantic jerryrigging will keep the stock market from reflecting the actual, increasingly dismal state of the economy.

 We’re already in a steep economic downturn, and it’s going to get worse over the year to come, but you won’t find out about that from the mainstream media, which will be full of the usual fact-free cheerleading; you’ll have to watch the rates at which the people you know are being laid off and businesses are shutting their doors instead.

All that’s a slam-dunk at this point. Still, for those readers who want to see me taking on a little more predictive risk, I have something to offer. There’s a wild card in play in the US economy just now, and it’s the tech sector—no, let’s call things by less evasive names, shall we? The current tech bubble.

My financially savvy readers will know that a standard way to compare a company’s notional value to its real prospects is the ratio of the total price of all its stock to its annual earnings—the price/earnings or P/E ratio for short.

Healthy companies in a normal economy usually have P/E ratios between 10 and 20; that is, their total stock value is between ten and twenty times their annual earnings.

Care to guess what the P/E ratio is for Amazon as of last Friday’s close? A jawdropping 985. At that, Amazon is in better shape than some other big-name tech firms these days, as it actually has earnings.

Twitter, for example, has never gotten around to making a profit at all, and so its P/E ratio is its current absurd stock value divided by zero.

Valuations this detached from reality haven’t been seen since immediately before the “Tech Wreck” of 2000, and the reason is exactly the same: vast amounts of easy money have flooded into the tech sector, and that torrent of cash has propped up an assortment of schemes and scams that make no economic sense at all.

Sooner or later, as a function of the same hard math that brings every bubble to an end, Tech Wreck II is going to hit, vast amounts of money are going to evaporate, and a lot of currently famous tech companies are going to go the way of Pets.com.

Exactly when that will happen is a good question, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the next tech bust will be under way by the end of 2016.

That’s specific prediction #1.

Another aspect of economic reality that’s going to hit hard in the year ahead is the ongoing deflation of the fracking bubble.

Aside from the straightforward financial impact of that deflation, the failure of fracking to live up to the cornucopian fantasies piled onto it means that a lot of people who relied on it as a way of ignoring the harsh realities of planetary limits are going to have to find something else, so they can have new excuses for living the lifestyles that are wrecking the planet.

There’s no shortage of candidates just now; no doubt billions of dollars, Euros, et al, will continue to be poured down the bottomless rathole of fusion research, and the government feed trough will doubtless have plenty of other corporate swine lined up and grunting for their share, but my best guess at this point is that photovoltaic (PV) solar energy is going to be the next big energy bubble.

Solar PV is a good deal less environmentally benign than its promoters like to claim—like so many so-called “green” technologies, the environmental damage it causes happens mostly in the trajectory from mining the raw materials to manufacture and deployment, not in day-to-day operation—and the economics of grid-tied solar power are so dubious that in practice, grid-tied PV is a subsidy dumpster rather than a serious energy source.

Nonetheless, I expect to see such points brushed aside, airily or angrily as the case may be, as the solar lobby and its wholly-owned subsidiaries in the green movement make an all-out push to sell solar PV as the next big thing.

The same rhetoric deployed to sell ethanol and fracking as game-changing innovations, which of course they weren’t, will be trotted out again for PV, as the empty promises made at the recent COP-21 meeting in Paris find their inevitable destiny as sales pitches for yet another alleged energy miracle that won’t fulfill the overinflated promises made on its behalf.

There’s still some uncertainty involved, but I’m going to predict that the mass marketing of what will inevitably be called “the PV revolution” will get under way in 2016.

That’s specific prediction #2.

Meanwhile the political context of American life is heating steadily toward an explosion. As I write this, a heavily armed band of militiamen is holed up in a building on a Federal wildlife refuge in the deserts of southeastern Oregon, trying to provoke a standoff.

Clownish as such stunts unquestionably are, it bears remembering that the activities of such violent abolitionists as John Brown looked just as pointless in their time; their importance was purely as a gauge of the pressures building toward civil war—and that’s exactly the same reading I give to the event just described.

That said, I don’t expect an armed insurgency of any scale to break out in the United States this year.

The era of rural and urban guerrilla warfare, roadside bombs, internment camps, horrific human rights violations by all sides, and millions of refugees fleeing in all directions, that will bring down the United States of America is still a little while off yet, for one crucial reason: a large enough fraction of the people most likely to launch the insurgencies of the near future have decided to give the political process one last try, and the thing that has induced them to do this is the candidacy of Donald Trump.

The significance of Trump’s astonishing progress to front-runner status is large and complex enough that it’s going to get a post of its own here in the near future.

For the moment, the point that matters is that a vast number of nominal Republicans are so sick of the business as usual being marketed by their party’s officially approved candidates that they’re willing to vote for absolutely anyone who is willing to break with the bipartisan consensus of what we might as well call the Dubyobama era: a consensus that has brought misery to the vast majority of Americans, but continues to benefit a privileged minority—not just the much-belabored 1%, but the top 20% or so of Americans by income.

Hillary Clinton is the candidate of that 20%, the choice of those who want things to keep going the way they’ve gone for the last two decades or so.

More precisely, she’s the one candidate of the business-as-usual brigade left standing, since the half of the 20% that votes Democrat has rallied around her and done their best to shut down the competition, while the half that votes Republican failed to rally around Jeb Bush or one of his bland and interchangeable rivals, and thus got sidelined when the 80% made their own choice.

It’s still possible that Bernie Sanders could pull off an upset, if he trounces Clinton in a couple of early primaries and the Democrat end of the 80% makes its voice heard, but that’s a long shot. Far more likely at this point is an election pitting Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump—and though Sanders could probably beat Trump, Clinton almost certainly can’t.

Granted, there are plenty of twists and turns ahead as America stumbles through its long, unwieldy, and gaudily corrupt election process. It’s possible that the GOP will find some way to keep Trump from gettng the nomination, in which case whoever gets the Republican nod will lose by a landslide as the GOP end of the 80% stays home.

It’s possible that given enough election fraud—anyone who thinks this is purely a GOP habit should read Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot, which details how Joe Kennedy bought the 1960 election for his son—Clinton might still squeak through and get into the White House. It’s even possible that Sanders will claw his way over the barriers raised against him by the Democrat establishment and win the race.

At this point, though, little though I like to say this, the most likely outcome of the 2016 election is the inauguration of Donald Trump as President in January 2017.

That’s specific prediction #3.

Then there’s the wider context, the international political situation that’s dominated by a fact next to nobody in this country is willing to discuss: the rapid acceleration of America’s imperial decline and fall over the last year.

That’s something I’ve been expecting—I discussed it at length in my book Decline and Fall and also in my near-future political-military thriller novel Twilight’s Last Gleaming—but the details came as a surprise, not only to me, but apparently to everyone outside a few tightly guarded office buildings in Moscow.

The Russian intervention in Syria has turned out to be one of the few real game-changing events in recent years, shifting the balance of power decisively against the US in a pivotal part of the world and revealing weaknesses that the illusion of US omnipotence has heretofore concealed.

As a result, probably though not certainly before 2016 is over, the Daesh jihadi militia—the so-called “Islamic State”—is going to get hammered into irrelevance.

That latter may turn out to be a significant turning point in more ways than one, because the Daesh phenomenon is considerably more complex than the one-dimensional caricature being presented by the US media.

The evidence at this point makes it pretty clear that Daesh is being funded and supported by a number of Middle Eastern nations, with Turkey and Saudi Arabia probably the biggest contributors; those iconic white pickup trucks aren’t popping into being in the middle of the Syrian desert by the sheer grace of Allah, after all.

It’s also at least suggestive that the US, in a year of supposed air war against Daesh, not only failed to slow it down, but somehow never managed to notice, much less target, the miles-long convoys of tanker trucks hauling oil north to Turkey to cover the costs of jihad.

Something very murky has been going on in the northern Tigris-Euphrates river valley, and it deserves a post of its own here, since it will very likely will play a major role in the decline of American empire and the rise of a new global hegemony under different management.

Regular readers may find it helpful to review this blog’s previous discussion of geopolitics, or even find a stray volume of Halford Mackinder and read it, keeping in mind that regions and continents have Pivot Areas of their own. Still, there’s a specific consequence that’s likely to follow from all this.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a fine example of a phemomenon all too familiar to students of history: a crumbling, clueless despotism which never got the memo warning that it couldn’t get away any longer with acting like a major power.

The steady decline in the price of oil has left the kingdom in ghastly financial condition, forced to borrow money on international credit markets to pay its bills, while slashing the lavish subsidies that keep its citizens compliant.

A prudent ruling class in that position would avoid foreign adventures and cultivate the kind of good relationships with neighboring powers that would give it room to maneuver in a crisis.

As so often happens in such cases, though, the rulers of Saudi Arabia are anything but prudent, and they’ve plunged openly into a shooting war just over its southern borders in Yemen, and covertly but massively into the ongoing mess in Syria and Iraq.

The war in Yemen is not going well—Yemeni forces have crossed the Saudi border repeatedly in raids on southern military bases—and the war in Syria and Iraq is turning out even worse.

At this point, the kingdom can’t effectively withdraw from either struggle, nor can it win either one; its internal affairs are becoming more and more troubled, and the treasury is running low. It’s a familiar recipe, and one that has an even more familiar outcome: the abrupt collapse of the monarchy, followed by prolonged chaos until one or more new governments consolidate their power.

Those of my readers who know about the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires at the end of the First World War have a heads-up on tomorrow’s news.

When that happens—and at this point, it’s a matter of when rather than if—the impact on the world’s petroleum markets, investment markets, and politics will be jarring and profound, and almost impossible to predict in detail in advance.

The timing of political collapse is not much easier to predict, but here again, I’m going to plop for a date and say that the Saudi regime will be gone by the end of 2016.

That’s specific prediction #4.

I admit quite cheerfully that all four of these predictions may turn out to be dead wrong. That the current tech bubble will pop messily, and that the House of Saud will implode just as messily, are to my mind done deals—in both cases, there’s a reliable historical pattern well under way, which will proceed to its predictable conclusion—but the timing is impossible to know in advance.

That something or other will be loudly ballyhooed as the next reason privileged Americans don’t have to change their lifestyles, and that the collision between the policies of the Dubyobama era and the resentment and rage of those who’ve paid the cost of those policies will set US politics ablaze, are just as certain, but it’s impossible to be sure in advance that solar PV and Donald Trump will be the beneficiaries.

The simple reality remains that here in America, we’ve poured nearly all our remaining options for constructive change down the ratholes of the future, and the one option that could still accomplish something—the option of changing our lifestyles now, in order to decrease the burden we place on the planet and what’s left of the industrial economy—is considered unthinkable right across the political spectrum.

That being the case, those of us who are doing the unthinkable, while we insulate our homes, sell our cars and other energy-wasting items, learn useful skills, and pursue the other pragmatic steps that matter just now, might want to lay in a good supply of popcorn, too; it’s going to be quite a show.

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Too Little, Too Late

SUBHEAD: At COP21 the world’s nations tried to limit the rate at which the greenhouse gases will increase in the future.

By John Michael Greer on 23 December 2015 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/12/too-little-too-late.html)


Image above: Miami Beach is raising city streets to meet the future and leaving ground level businesses in what amount to ditches. From (http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/miami-beach/article41141856.html).

Last week, after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the Titanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull. Despite the torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric currently flooding into the media from the White House and an assortment of groups on the domesticated end of the environmental movement, that’s the sum of what happened at the COP-21 conference in Paris.

It’s a spectacle worth observing, and not only for those of us who are connoisseurs of irony; the factors that drove COP-21 to the latest round of nonsolutions are among the most potent forces shoving industrial civilization on its one-way trip to history’s compost bin.

The core issues up for debate at the Paris meeting were the same that have been rehashed endlessly at previous climate conferences.

The consequences of continuing to treat the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer for humanity’s pollutants are becoming increasingly hard to ignore, but nearly everything that defines a modern industrial economy as “modern” and “industrial” produces greenhouse gases, and the continued growth of the world’s modern industrial economies remains the keystone of economic policy around the world.

The goal pursued by negotiators at this and previous climate conferences, then, is to find some way to do something about anthropogenic global warming that won’t place any kind of restrictions on economic growth.

What that means in practice is that the world’s nations have more or less committed themselves to limit the rate at which the dumping of greenhouse gases will increase over the next fifteen years. I’d encourage those of my readers who think anything important was accomplished at the Paris conference to read that sentence again, and think about what it implies.

The agreement that came out of COP-21 doesn’t commit anybody to stop dumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, now or at any point in the future. It doesn’t even commit anybody to set a fixed annual output that will not be exceeded. It simply commits the world’s nations to slow down the rate at which they’re increasing their dumping of greenhouse gases.

If this doesn’t sound to you like a recipe for saving the world, let’s just say you’re not alone.

It wasn’t exactly encouraging that the immediate aftermath of the COP-21 agreement was a feeding frenzy among those industries most likely to profit from modest cuts in greenhouse gas consumption—yes, those would be the renewable-energy and nuclear industries, with some efforts to get scraps from the table by proponents of “clean coal,” geoengineering, fusion-power research, and a few other subsidy dumpsters of the same sort.

Naomi Oreskes, a writer for whom I used to have a certain degree of respect, published a crassly manipulative screed insisting that anybody who questioned the claim that renewable-energy technologies could keep industrial society powered forever was engaged in, ahem, “a new form of climate denialism.”

She was more than matched, to be fair, by a chorus of meretricious shills for the nuclear industry, who were just as quick to insist that renewables couldn’t be scaled up fast enough and nuclear power was the only alternative.

The shills in question are quite correct, as it happens, that renewable energy can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossil fuels; they could have said with equal truth that renewable energy can’t be scaled up far enough to accomplish that daunting task.

The little detail they’re evading is that nuclear power can’t be scaled up far enough or fast enough, either.

What’s more, however great they look on paper or PowerPoint, neither nuclear power nor grid-scale renewable power are economically viable in the real world. The evidence for this is as simple as it is conclusive: no nation anywhere on the planet has managed either one without vast and continuing government subsidies.

Lacking those, neither one makes enough economic sense to be worth building, because neither one can provide the kind of cheap abundant electrical power that makes a modern industrial society possible.

Say this in the kind of company that takes global climate change seriously, of course, and if you aren’t simply shouted down by those present—and of course this is the most common response—you can expect to hear someone say, “Well, something has to do it.” Right there you can see the lethal blindness that pervades nearly all contemporary debates about the future, because it’s simply not true that something has to do it. 

No divine providence nor any law of nature guarantees that human beings must have access to as much cheap abundant electricity as they happen to want.

Stated thus baldly, that may seem like common sense, but that sort of sense is far from common these days, even—or especially—among those people who think they’re grappling with the hard realities of the future. Here’s a useful example.

One of this blog’s readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Antroposcen—made an elegant short film that was shown at a climate-themed film festival in Paris while the COP-21 meeting was slouching toward its pointless end.

The film is titled A Message from the Past, and as the title suggests, it portrays an incident from a future on the far side of global climate change. I encourage my readers to click through and watch it now; it’s only a few minutes long, and its point will be perfectly clear to any regular reader of this blog. 

The audience at the film festival, though, found it incomprehensible. The nearest they came to making sense of it was to guess that, despite the title, it was about a message from our time that had somehow found its way to the distant past.

The thought that the future on the far side of global climate change might have some resemblance to the preindustrial past—that people in that future, in the wake of the immense collective catastrophes our actions are busy creating for them, might wear handmade clothing of primitive cut and find surviving scraps of our technologies baffling relics of a bygone time—seems to have been wholly beyond the grasp of their imaginations.

Two factors make this blindness to an entire spectrum of probable futures astonishing. The first is that not that long ago, plenty of people in the climate change activism scene were talking openly about the possibility that uncontrolled climate change could stomp industrial society with the inevitability of a boot descending on an eggshell.

I’m thinking here, among other examples, of the much-repeated claim by James Lovelock a few years back that the likely outcome of global climate change, if nothing was done, was heat so severe that the only human survivors a few centuries from now would be “a few hundred breeding pairs” huddled around the shores of the Arctic Ocean.

It used to be all the rage in climate change literature to go on at length about the ghastly future that would be ours if global temperatures warmed far enough to trigger serious methane releases from northern permafrost, tip one or more of the planet’s remaining ice sheets into rapid collapse, and send sea water rising to drown low-lying regions. Lurid scenarios of civilizational collapse and mass dieoff appeared in book after lavishly marketed book.

Of late, though, that entire theme seems to have dropped out of the collective imagination of the activist community, to be replaced by strident claims that everything will be just fine if we ignore the hard lessons of the last thirty years of attempted renewable-energy buildouts and fling every available dollar, euro, yuan, etc. into subsidies for an even more grandiose wave of uneconomical renewable-energy powerplants.

The second factor is even more remarkable, and it’s the existence of that first factor that makes it so.

Those methane releases, rising seas, and collapsing ice sheets? They’re no longer confined to the pages of remaindered global warming books. They’re happening in the real world, right now.

Methane releases? Check out the massive craters blown out of Siberian permafrost in the last few years by huge methane burps, or the way the Arctic Ocean fizzes every summer like a freshly poured soda as underwater methane deposits get destabilized by rising temperatures.

Methane isn’t the world-wrecking ultrapollutant that a certain class of apocalyptic fantasy likes to imagine, mostly because it doesn’t last long in the atmosphere—the average lifespan of a methane molecule once it seeps out of the permafrost is about ten years—but while it’s there, it traps heat much more effectively than carbon dioxide.

The Arctic is already warming far more drastically than any other region of the planet, and the nice thick blanket of methane with which it’s wrapped itself is an important part of the reason why.

Those methane releases make a great example of the sudden stop that overtook discussions of the harsh future ahead of us, once that future started to arrive. Before they began to occur, methane releases played a huge role in climate change literature—Mark Lynas’ colorful and heavily marketed book Six Degrees is only one of many examples. Once the methane releases actually got under way, as I noted in a post here some years ago, most activists abruptly stopped talking about it, and references to methane on the doomward end of the blogosphere started fielding dismissive comments by climate-change mavens insisting that methane doesn’t matter and carbon dioxide is the thing to watch.

Rising seas? You can watch that in action in low-lying coastal regions anywhere in the world, but for a convenient close-up, pay a visit to Miami Beach, Florida. You’ll want to do that quickly, though, while it’s still there. Sea levels off Florida have been rising about an inch a year, and southern Florida, Miami Beach included, is built on porous limestone. 

These days, as a result, whenever an unusually high tide combines with a strong onshore wind, salt water comes bubbling up from the storm sewers and seeping right out of the ground, and the streets of Miami Beach end up hubcap-deep in it. Further inland, seawater is infiltrating the aquifer from which southern Florida gets drinking water, and killing plants in low-lying areas near the coast.

The situation in southern Florida gets some press, but I suspect this is because Florida is a red state and the state government’s frantic denial that global warming is happening makes an easy target for humor.

The same phenomenon is happening at varying paces elsewhere in the world, as a combination of thermal expansion of warming seawater, runoff from melting glaciers, and a grab-bag of local and regional oceanographic phenomena boosts sea level well above its historic place.

Nothing significant is being done about it—to be fair, it’s unlikely that anything significant can be done about it at this point, short of a total moratorium on greenhouse gas generation, and the COP-21 talks made it painfully clear that that’s not going to happen.

Instead, southern Florida faces a fate that’s going to be all too familiar to many millions of people elsewhere in the world over the years ahead. As fresh water runs short and farm and orchard crops die from salt poisoning, mass migration will be the order of the day.

Over the short term, southern Florida will gradually turn into salt marsh; look further into the future, and you can see Florida’s ultimate destiny, as a region of shoals, reefs, and islets extending well out into the Gulf of Mexico, with the corroded ruins of skyscrapers rising from the sea here and there as a reminder of the fading past.

Does this sound like science fiction? It’s the inescapable consequence of changes that are already under way.

Even if COP-21 had produced an agreement that mattered—say, a binding commitment on the part of all the world’s nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions immediately and lower them to zero by 2030—southern Florida would still be doomed. 

The processes that are driving sea levels up can’t turn on a dime; just as it took more than a century of unrestricted atmospheric pollution to begin the flooding of southern Florida, it would take a long time and a great deal of hard work to reverse that, even if the political will was available. As it is, the agreement signed in Paris simply means that the flooding will continue unchecked.

A far more dramatic series of events, meanwhile, is getting under way far north of Florida. Yes, that’s the breakup of the Greenland ice sheet.

During the last few summers, as unprecedented warmth gripped the Arctic, rivers of meltwater have begun flowing across Greenland’s glacial surface, plunging into a growing network of chasms and tunnels that riddle the ice sheet like the holes in Swiss cheese. This is new; discussions of Greenland’s ice sheet from as little as five years ago didn’t mention the meltwater rivers at all, much less the hollowing out of the ice.

Equally new is the fact that the vast majority of that meltwater isn’t flowing into the ocean—scientists have checked that, using every tool at their disposal up to and including legions of yellow rubber ducks tossed into meltwater streams.

What all this means is that in the decades immediately ahead of us, in all likelihood, we’ll get to see a spectacle no human being has seen since the end of the last ice age: the catastrophic breakup of a major ice sheet.

If you got taught in school, as so many American schoolchildren were, that the great glacial sheets of the ice age melted at an imperceptible pace, think again; glaciologists disproved that decades ago.

What happens, instead, is a series of sudden collapses that kick the pace of melting into overdrive at unpredictable intervals. What paleoclimatologists call global meltwater pulses—sudden surges of ice and water from collapsing ice sheets—send sea levels soaring by several meters, drowning large tracts of land in an impressively short time.

Ice sheet collapses happen in a variety of ways, and Greenland is very well positioned to enact one of the better documented processes. The vast weight of all that ice pressing down on the crust through the millennia has turned the land beneath the ice into a shallow bowl surrounded by mountains—and that shallow bowl is where all the meltwater is going.

Eventually the water will rise high enough to find an outlet to the sea, and when it does, it will begin to flow out—and it will take much of the ice with it.

As that happens, seismographs across the North Atlantic basin will go crazy as Greenland’s ice sheet, tormented beyond endurance by the conflict between gravity and buoyancy, begins to break apart. A first great meltwater surged will vomit anything up to thousands of cubic miles of ice into the ocean.

 Huge icebergs will drift east and then south on the currents, and release more water as they melt. After that, summer after summer, the process will repeat itself, until some fraction of Greenland’s total ice sheet has been dumped into the ocean.

How large a fraction? That’s impossible to know in advance, but all other things being equal, the more greenhouse gases get dumped into the atmosphere, the faster and more complete Greenland’s breakup will be.

Oh, and did I mention that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to break up as well?

The thing to keep in mind here is that the coming global meltwater pulse will have consequences all over the world.

Once it happens—and again, the processes that will lead to that event are already well under way, and nothing the world’s industrial nations are willing to do can stop it—it will simply be a matter of time before the statistically inevitable combination of high tides and stormwinds sends sea water flooding into New York City’s subway system and the vast network of underground tunnels that houses much of the city’s infrastructure.

Every other coastal city in the world will wait for its own number to come up. No doubt we’ll hear plenty of talk about building vast new flood defenses to keep back the rising waters, but let us please be real; any such project would require years of lead time and almost unimaginable amounts of money, and no nation anywhere in the world is showing the least interest in doing the thing now, when it might still be an option.

There’s a profound irony, in other words, in all the rhetoric from Paris about balancing concerns about the climate with the supposed need for perpetual economic growth. Imagine for a moment just how the coming global meltwater pulse will impact the world economy.

Countless trillions of dollars in coastal infrastructure around the world will become “sunk costs” in more than a metaphorical sense; millions of people in low-lying areas such as southern Florida will have to relocate as their homes become uninhabitable, and trillions of dollars of real estate will have its value drop to zero.

A galaxy of costs for which nobody is planning will have to be met out of government and business revenue streams that have been hammered by the direct and indirect effects of worldwide coastal flooding.

What’s more, it won’t be a single event, over and done with in a few weeks or months or years.  Every year for decades or centuries to come, more ice and meltwater will go sluicing into the oceans, more coastal cities and regions will face that one seawater surge too many, more costs will have to be met out of what’s left of a global economy that’s running out of functioning deepwater ports among many other things.

The result, as I’ve noted in previous posts here, will be the disintegration of everything that counts as business as usual, and the opening phases of the bleak new reality that Frank Landis has sketched out in his harrowing new book Hot Earth Dreams—the best currently available book on what the world will look like in the wake of severe climate change, and thus inevitably ignored by everyone in the current environmental mainstream.(You can read the first five chapters of Landis' book here.)

By the time COP-21’s attendees convened in Paris, it was probably already too late to keep global climate change from spinning completely out of control. The embarrassingly feeble agreement that came out of that event, though, has guaranteed that nothing significant will be done.

The hard political and economic realities that made any actual cut in greenhouse gas emissions all but unthinkable are just layers of icing on the cake, part of the predicament of our time—a predicament that defines the words “too little, too late” as our basic approach to the future looming up ahead of us.

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COP21 Reaction Summary

SUBHEAD: "This didn’t save the planet but it may have saved the chance of saving the planet.” - Bill McKibbon


By John Foran on 14 December 2015 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-12-14/the-paris-agreement-paper-heroes-widen-the-climate-justice-gap)


Image above: Originally the COP21 sign on the Eiffel Tower read "Paris Climat 2015". That had to be revised Saturday. From (http://www.euronews.com/2015/12/11/cop21-more-time-for-talking/).

[IB Publisher's note: Our governments have failed us. Those pushing growth, consumerism, militarism, capitalism, corporatism (in their retreat from reality) have held back the friends of the Earth fighting Global Warming. The collapse of growth dependent industrailzation is inevitable, but what shape the planet is in when it is finally flushed away is now up to us. If you want an Earth to sustain anything more complex than bacteria you better get crackin'. Nobody but you can make where you are compatible with complex life on Earth.] 

The day after can be a source of regret, or a new beginning.  It all depends on how much we can perceive the importance of events in time, in history, in life itself.

On Saturday, December 12, in Paris, the negotiators at the COP 21 UN climate summit came to a final decision on the text they have been negotiating for four years, or six, or twenty-one by signaling their assent to a thirty-two page document, titled simply “ The Paris Agreement .”

Not quite a treaty, since it is not really legally binding in a strict sense, it gives the world its second global climate accord, superseding the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and replacing it with a global map for our climate future agreed by all 196 parties to it, the nations of the world.

It’s just not a map to any kind of future we should want.

Saving the World:  The Master Narrative
Scenes of relief and jubilation broke out on the floor of the closing plenary when Laurent Fabius, the President of COP 21, gaveled the session to a close amidst thunderous applause late on Saturday afternoon.  It was a huge diplomatic accomplishment to get the nations to agree to anything, as anyone who has ever followed a COP can attest.

And in this sense, it was a miracle, since going into Paris the parties were far apart on all the tough negotiating issues that had stymied progress over the years:  who should be responsible for emissions reductions, how massive adaptation funds should be raised and allocated to the Global South, and who would help climate-impacted countries recover from the loss and damage of catastrophic weather events.

Of the agreement, Laurent Fabius said:

“It is my deep conviction that we have come up with an ambitious and balanced agreement. Today it is a moment of truth.”  

Not shy about taking credit, Barack Obama said:

“We’ve transformed the United States into the global leader in fighting climate change,” and tweeted:  “This is huge: Almost every country in the world just signed on to the #Paris Agreement on climate change – thanks to American leadership.”  

Al Gore was “visibly moved” while John Kerry announced :

"It’s a victory for all of the planet and future generations.”   

French President François Hollande observed:

“12 December 2015 will be a date to go down in history as a major leap for mankind.  It is rare in any lifetime to have a chance to change the world.”

Some international experts agreed.

Lord Stern, author of Why Are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency, and Promise of Tackling Climate Change, proclaimed :

“This is a historic moment, not just for us and our world today, but for our children, our grandchildren and future generations. The Paris Agreement is a turning point in the world’s fight against unmanaged climate change, which threatens prosperity and wellbeing among both rich and poor countries.”

Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research effused :

“The spirits of Paris have defeated the ghosts of Copenhagen! Reason and moral combined at the COP21 to deliver a historical climate agreement that finally transcends national egotisms.”   

In the view of Eva Filzmoser, director at Carbon Market Watch,  

“The French Presidency achieved a miracle in presenting a detailed treaty acceptable to all Parties. At first reading, the new global climate treaty is surprisingly positive. We are still looking for the loopholes.”

Most of the world press will by now have followed suit.  The message that goes out to the world will be the saving the planet one, tempered to some degree by any closer look at the details, and failing to credit the success of the climate justice movement in raising awareness about the issues, or noting its own, more nuanced and critical assessments, in the narratives that are being written at a furious pace.

Burning the World:  The Climate Movement Judges the Paris Outcome
First reactions from the climate movements, NGOs, and activists were decidedly mixed, and where one stood on the Agreement could be a political litmus test of where the climate movement’s fault lines and political sensibilities lie.

Truly celebratory praise came instantly from the more than seven hundred million-member on-line movement Avaaz, in the form of an e-mail from Emma Ruby-Sachs titled:   
“We did it! – A turning point in human history”:

World leaders at the UN climate talks have just set a landmark goal that can save everything we love! This is what we marched for, what we signed, called, donated, messaged, and hoped for: a brilliant and massive turning point in human history.
It’s called net-zero human emissions – a balancing of what we release into the air and what is taken out – and when the dust settles and the Paris Agreement is in the hands of lawmakers, clean energy will be the best, cheapest, and most effective way to keep their promise. This gives us the platform we need to realize the dream of a safe future for generations!
Out of great crises, humanity has borne beautiful visions. World War II gave rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an enduring standard for our spirit and capacity as one people. The fall of Apartheid led South Africa to the single most bold and progressive constitution in the world.
Ambitious visions like these rely on movements to carry them into the mainstream, and on movements to make them reality in our everyday lives. Today is no exception.

Some of the trouble with this formulation is indicated by other large climate NGOs.  There were many shades of criticism, beginning with the cautious optimism of Greenpeace International Director Kumi Naidoo, who drew the balance sheet this way :

The wheel of climate action turns slowly, but in Paris it has turned. This deal puts the fossil fuel industry on the wrong side of history.

There’s much in the text that has been diluted and polluted by the people who despoil our planet, but it contains a new imperative to limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees. That single number, and the new goal of net zero emissions by the second half of this century, will cause consternation in the boardrooms of coal companies and the palaces of oil-exporting states…

There’s not enough in this deal for the nations and people on the frontlines of climate change. It contains an inherent, ingrained injustice. The nations which caused this problem have promised too little help to the people who are already losing their lives and livelihoods.

The global movement 350.org, far more radical in its views than it used to be, went further.  In the words of Bill McKibben:

“Every government seems now to recognize that the fossil fuel era must end and soon. But the power of the fossil fuel industry is reflected in the text, which drags out the transition so far that endless climate damage will be done. Since pace is the crucial question now, activists must redouble our efforts to weaken that industry. This didn’t save the planet but it may have saved the chance of saving the planet.” 

May Boeve, 350’s Executive Director, believes the Agreement can be used in the fight against the fossil fuel corporations and countries:

“This marks the end of the era of fossil fuels. There is no way to meet the targets laid out in this agreement without keeping coal, oil and gas in the ground. The text should send a clear signal to fossil fuel investors: divest now."

The climate justice and radical spectrum was unequivocal in its condemnation.  In a spirited defiance of police orders not to assemble (the government gave in at the last minute), an estimated 15,000 or more determined climate activists gathered to protest the agreement’s crossing of “red lines” for the planet and to honor those whose lives have been lost to climate injustice.

And at a gathering of thousands of activists who held hands in front of the Eiffel Tower on Saturday, Naomi Klein said what had to be said:

Our leaders have shown themselves willing to set our world on fire and we will not let that happen.  Our mood today is not one of despair but rather a clarifying sense of commitment and purpose.  We knew that these were not the real leaders.  We knew that the leaders were in the streets, that the leaders were in the fields, that this city is filled with climate heroes.

Despite their beautiful words, our leaders remained trapped in a broken system and a crashing worldview based on dominance of people and the planet and that worldview simply does not allow them to align their words, their goals, with their actions. 

And so the gap is increased between the rhetoric and the goal of safety and the reality of the epic danger they are allowing to unfold.  And the gap is increased between the expressions of solidarity with the most vulnerable and the reality of those leaders consistently putting the interests of the rich and powerful before the interests of the vulnerable, and indeed the interests of all humanity.

Our leaders have none of the courage that it takes to stand up to the corporate interests that are responsible for this crisis.  They can’t even say the words “fossil fuels” in this text.  So it is up to us to do what they so clearly refuse to do, which is to stand up to the polluters and make them pay.

And we will do this everywhere, using every tool that we can.  We will do it in the streets with protests like this one, and we will do it in the face of every single polluting project that they decide to try to roll out.

We are doing this already, and we’re winning….  This is a global movement.  Some of us call it Blockadia.  So we will take them on in the streets, the forests, and in the water.  In our schools, in our places of worship, and in our cities.  And we’re going after them with our art, with our culture, because as we know, the logic of austerity in incompatible with life on Earth…

We are accelerating the rollout of a society that is based on protecting life, on climate justice, on energy democracy…

As we go forward, we also have to acknowledge the grief, grief that we will not deny nor will we suppress, grief at what we have already lost, for those whom we have already lost.

And we acknowledge that there is also rage at those who could have acted long ago but chose not to, and at those who make that same disastrous decision still.

But mostly, mostly there is joy.  Mostly there is joy and resolve as we witness the next world taking shape before our eyes.  We used to think that it was our job to save the world.  Then we realized that we are really saving ourselves.  We used to say that were here to protect nature, and now we say that we are nature, protecting herself.

Under the title, “Too weak, too late, say climate justice campaigners” can be found an extensive compendium of radical opinion that emerged within hours of the outcome (the following indented quotes come from this very useful piece).

“This deal offers a frayed life-line to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.”
– Helen Szoke, executive director, Oxfam

“The US is a cruel hypocrite. Obama spoke about embracing the US’s role of creating the problem and the need to take responsibility. This is all talk and no action. They created a clause that excludes compensation and liability for the losses and damages brought on by climate chaos. This is a deliberate plan to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”
- Lidy Nacpil, Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development

“We, Indigenous Peoples, are the redline. We have drawn that line with our bodies against the privatization of nature, to dirty fossil fuels and to climate change. We are the defenders of the world’s most biologically and culturally diverse regions. We will protect our sacred lands. Our knowledge has much of the solutions to climate change that humanity seeks. It’s only when they listen to our message that ecosystems of the world will be renewed.”
- Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director, Indigenous Environmental Network

“The Paris Agreement will be known as the Polluters’ Great Escape since it weakens rules on the rich countries and puts the world on a pathway to 3C warming.”
– Victor Menotti, International Forum on Globalization

“The price tag for climate damages this century will be in the trillions, with much of that damage in poor and vulnerable countries. The US is responsible for much of that toll, but they don’t care and they won’t pay. With arm twisting of developing countries, they have language now protecting the richest and heaping devastating costs onto the poorest.”
- Dorreen Stabinsky, Prof. of Global Environmental Politics, College of the Atlantic

“Close to 100% reductions are needed by developed countries already by 2030 for a reasonable chance of 2°, let alone 1.5° world. Paris had the opportunity to deliver radical pre-2020 action and did none of this. Developed countries’ refusal to commit to either cuts or necessary finance means we are sleepwalking into climate chaos.”
- Niclas Hällström, What Next Forum

“The Paris negotiators are caught up in a frenzy of self-congratulation about 1.5 degrees being included in the agreement, but the reality is that the reductions on the table are still locking us into 3 degrees of global warming…. The bullying and arm twisting of rich countries, combined with the pressure to agree to a deal at all costs, has ensured that the agreement will prevent poor countries from seeking redress for the devastating impacts of a crisis that has been thrust upon them.”
- Nick Dearden the director of Global Justice Now

“The deal fails to deliver the rules and tools to ensure that climate change doesn’t spiral out of control. Many in Paris seem to have forgotten the very people that this climate agreement was supposed to protect….  In spite of this result in Paris, people all over the world must push their governments to go beyond what they have agreed here.”
- Teresa Anderson, Policy Officer, ActionAid International

The key organizers of climate justice actions by civil society during COP 21 were unanimous in their condemnation of the outcome.

Sara Shaw, Friends of the Earth International climate justice and energy coordinator  said: 

“Rich countries have moved the goal posts so far that we are left with a sham of a deal in Paris. Through piecemeal pledges and bullying tactics, rich countries have pushed through a very bad deal.”

Asad Rehman of the same organization, who knows as much about justice issues at the COP as anyone, put it this way:

“The iceberg has struck, the ship is going down and the band is still playing to warm applause.”

Attac France, one of the key climate justice organizations on the ground in Paris, active in every aspect of the mobilization of civil society, was equally critical.

Activist and spokesperson on climate issues Maxime Coombes said:

“The mandate given to COP 21, François Hollande and Laurent Fabius was not to get an accord at any price.  To use the terms ‘ambitious,’ ‘just,’ and ‘legally binding’ in presenting the Agreement is an intellectual fraud.  And to add a vague reference to ‘climate justice’ is contemptuous of all who have mobilized under its name for years.” 

 Attac spokesperson Thomas Coutrot added:

“The emptiness of this agreement reflects the powerlessness of governments to attack the true causes of climate disruption.  This comes as no surprise:  the greed of the multinationals, the fossil fuel energy, and the obsession with growth are considered untouchable.”

Danny Chivers and Jess Worth, who have been providing excellent coverage of COP 21 for The New Internationalist, evaluate the outcome in terms of the four criteria of The People’s Test developed by movement organizations from the global South.  These are:

1. Catalyze immediate, urgent and drastic emission reductions;
2. Provide adequate support for transformation;
3. Deliver justice for impacted people;
4. Focus on genuine, effective action rather than false solutions.

The title of their piece gives the answer:  “Paris deal: Epic fail on a planetary scale.”

Where is the Justice?
The central failures of what has happened in Paris have been underlined by the trenchant criticisms above.  Based on a year-long study of the process, actually stretching back to my first time inside the COP in Durban four years ago, and shaped by these roller-coaster two weeks in Paris, I offer here my first reflections on what is, by any measure, a historic moment in the sense that it will shape all our futures.

There are two huge gaps between the lines of the Agreement:  one of greenhouse gas emissions and one of elementary climate justice.

The INDCs that constitute the core of the Agreement’s stance on the greenhouse gases that are driving global warming faster and faster toward the cliff of extreme danger, give us a world of something over three degrees Celsius – in other worlds, Paris has been a completely unacceptable failure to take the kind of action that climate science is screaming for and the world’s people must have.

If anything, mentioning 1.5 degrees in the text only heightens this glaring hole at the center of the plan to save the planet, highlighting how far away our governments are from being able to rise to the greatest challenge that humanity has ever faced.

Of the 180 pledges received, only two have been judged “sufficient” by Climate Action Tracker , those of Gambia and Bhutan, whose share in global emissions is vanishingly small, and whose courageous actions are therefore symbolic, in both the sense of “only symbolic” and “visionary and humane.”

Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, noted that

“The Copenhagen text included aviation and shipping emissions, that together are as large as the emissions of Britain and Germany combined, but they are not mentioned in the Paris text.’  Overall, he finds the agreement “weaker than Copenhagen” and “not consistent with the latest science.”  

This is put more colorfully but just as strongly by the United States’ most well-known climate scientist, James Hansen:

“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”

So, emissions remain essentially out of control, pace the optimists who make observations along the lines of “We have cut a degree or more of the business-as-usual scenario already, and we will do more and more as time goes on and the provisions for adjusting national pledges become increasingly ambitious.”  It is very hard for me to see this happening (and I’m an optimist too most days).

The words “climate justice” and “just transition” actually each appear once in the Agreement’s preamble, but they are passed over as foreign notions held by unnamed others:

“Noting the importance of ensuring the integrity of all ecosystems, including oceans, and the protection of biodiversity, recognized by some cultures as Mother Earth, and noting the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice’, when taking action to address climate change.”

In reality, instead of justice, the most vulnerable nations in the world have been betrayed by the global North and the big emitters like China and India.

Loss and damage remain words on paper, with no permanent standing, no mechanism for finding the funds, and a clear statement that no one is “liable” to pay assist countries hard hit already by climate catastrophe like the Philippines and many others to come.  The decision text on this makes clear “that Article 8 of the Agreement does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.”:

“The idea of even discussing loss and damage now or in the future was off limits. The Americans told us it would kill the COP,” said Leisha Beardmore, the chief negotiator for the Seychelles. “They have always been telling us: ‘Don’t even say that’.”

Instead of this, developing countries are offered “ Comprehensive risk assessment and management, risk insurance facilities, climate risk pooling and other insurance solutions.”

There is no firm commitment from any country to actually make a contribution to the Green Climate Fund’s promised $100 billion annually by 2020.  These funds are for making the front-line communities of the global South more resilient to the inevitable disasters that even 1.5 degrees with serve up with increasing frequency.  Instead, developed countries are “strongly urged” to find “a concrete roadmap” to locate this missing money!

There is nothing binding in the Paris Agreement that will force any government to act with compassion, responsibility, and more than words to bend the arc of climate change in the direction of justice.

And why should we expect otherwise?  The real problem with the COP process is that it can only produce a document forged by and for the world’s political and economic elites.  The most rapacious corporations in the world can carry on wrecking the planet, especially if they say the right things and make some gestures of awareness of the climate crisis.

The main mechanisms for bringing down emissions remain in marketized form, subject to every abuse that follows when we measure human needs and nature herself in the cold, hard terms of cash money.

Salvaging Something for the Future We Want
Enshrining the words “1.5 degrees Celsius” in a global climate accord opens a door to a house on fire, and will be turned into one of the most powerful memes of the global climate justice movement now.  We will finally turn the page on the COP process and get down to the business of transforming a world that has been broken by greed, callous disregard for life, and the slow violence that capitalism visits on the majority world, each day a little more cruelly than the last.

The climate justice movement has gained demonstrable strength in the course of 2014 and 2015, and here in Paris too.  The connections made here, the insights gained, the empowerment of activists of all ages, will be taken home to make deeper connections with the movements, organizations, front-line communities, and people who are already doing so much.

They will be used to try to stop the climate madness of the world’s political and economic elites, and the systems that have created it:  capitalism, patriarchy, racism, militarism, colonialism – all the operations of power in our warming world.

My guess is that at the end of the day, the network of networks that comprise the movement will be stronger than ever, going into the battles of 2016.

“When we came into these Paris talks we had very low expectations. These expectations have been exceeded in how low they are. It’s what happens on Monday that’s the most important thing. Do we return to our capitals, do we build a movement, do we make sure our countries are doing their fair share? Do we stop the dirty energy industry, do we invest in new climate jobs, do we invest in community-owned decentralized energy? And most importantly, do we stand in solidarity with the millions of people across the world who are struggling for climate justice?” – Asad Rehman, quoted by Danny Chivers

It’s up to the movements, networks, artivists, thinkers, bloggers, organizers, and countless “ordinary people” to step up in 2016.

We will create the worlds we dream of together, no matter what it takes, and we will fight to keep them alive in our hearts and our communities, helping Mother Earth defend herself, and in the process, rising to the great challenges of our time, step by step, win or lose, come what may.



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